By Murat Somer
When Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was arrested, Turkey’s democratic future reached a breaking point. In this two-part series, Murat Somer examines how that moment united the long-divided social and political opposition, sparking an unprecedented wave of mobilization and strategic innovation that holds the potential to turn into an enduring and consequential democracy movement.
Part I recounts the events that triggered mass resistance. Part II explores the movement’s evolving strategies, emerging alliances, and political stakes for Turkey’s future.
→ Continue to Part II: Turkey’s New Democracy Movement and Future
Turkey is facing an existential battle for the survival of its democracy, republic, and rule of law. Since the March 19 arrest of President Erdoğan’s main political rival, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and his team, millions have mobilized through nationwide protests, economic boycotts, signature campaigns, social media, and any other channel available to them. This new wave of opposition shows no signs of fading, despite the government’s hopes. If sustained, it could rightly be called a new democracy movement—unprecedented in its unity across political and social forces that had long resisted Erdoğan’s policies separately. Grounded in strategic innovation against autocracy and pernicious polarization, this promising mobilization features the elements of what scholars call “extraordinary democratic politics” that may be necessary to defeat contemporary elected autocrats and overcome democratic backsliding.
While Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimistic intellect” might doubt this resistance’s chances, the “optimistic will,” rooted in democratic traditions, creativity, and built-up anger at injustice across social, economic, and political fronts, gives reason for hope.
The democratic world should offer more potent and consistent support because this is not the Turkish democrats’ fight alone but part of the rapidly deepening democracy-autocracy cleavage across the globe.
How did We Get Here?
İmamoğlu’s arrest became the final straw in a series of authoritarian moves by the government since last fall. Erdoğan and his far-right nationalist coalition partner, Devlet Bahçeli, appear determined to wipe out what little remains of competitive politics, civic freedoms, and the rule of law. Over the past two decades, Erdoğan has perniciously polarized Turkish politics and society, gradually dismantling the country’s flawed yet well-established democracy. His consolidation of power has involved fierce trench warfare between supporters and opponents, institutional capture, and aggressive erosion of checks and balances. Through buyouts, judicial maneuvering, autocratic legalism, and the creation of client NGOs, he has secured a firm grip over large segments of civil society, including both private and public media.
Erdoğan initially oversaw economic stability and growth and even helped reduce poverty. However, his governance soon fueled debt-dependence, corruption, and cronyism, turning the welfare system into a partisan tool and politicizing economic policymaking. More recently, his populist electoral strategies, favoring both the very rich and the poor simultaneously, have deepened inequality and hollowed out the middle class. The Presidency of Religious Affairs emerged as another apparatus disciplining civil society, while financially, discursively, and politically empowering far-right Islamist and nationalist groups, thus accelerating Turkey’s secular backsliding.
Despite these conditions, Turkey’s opposition has remained resilient—if fragmented—along ideological, organizational, and ethnic lines, particularly with regard to the Kurdish movement. Since 2014, pro-democracy electoral coalitions have formed with growing sophistication, peaking ahead of the 2023 elections. These alliances have consistently garnered around half of the public support, both at the ballot box and in the streets. Even as Erdoğan tilted the playing field, most notably by building a pro-government media empire and imprisoning Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş in 2016, opposition parties remained fiercely competitive, winning key municipal races in 2019 and again in 2024. They even secured a parliamentary majority in 2015, only for Erdoğan to block any possible transfer of power. He did so by prolonging the coalition talks between his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), withholding the mandate from the CHP, and calling for renewed elections for the first time in the republic’s history. Then, by employing a “blood gambit” strategy, he formally ended a two-year peace process with the Kurds and adopted an ultra-nationalist discourse. This was followed by a spiral of terror attacks by ISIS and unidentified forces, as well as clashes with the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK), which terrorized the populace. The violence ended after Erdoğan regained his majority in the repeat elections.
Now, Erdoğan seems intent on eliminating any remaining vestiges of electoral competition, attempting to establish a Russian-style autocracy, cloaked in Islamist-nationalist rhetoric.
In recent months, he has intensified his crackdown, threatening and jailing elected mayors, politicians, journalists, artists, and businesspeople, while passing autocratic laws to seize companies. He has weaponized government-controlled media and politicized state institutions to slander opponents and criminalize dissent.
This vicious campaign reached its zenith with the assault on İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s widely popular mayor and the CHP’s presumed presidential candidate. Just a week before the party primaries, Istanbul University, under clear political pressure, annulled İmamoğlu’s university diploma, a legal requirement for presidential candidacy. The next morning, police arrested İmamoğlu at home. Calmly recording a message for his supporters while officers waited outside, İmamoğlu underscored the gravity of the moment. He emphasized that both the diploma annulment and the criminal charges—corruption and supporting terrorism—lacked legal basis, representing a textbook case of “unlawful lawfare.”
Who are the Actors in the Current Battle?
On one side stands President Erdoğan and his administration, consisting of unelected figures he appointed, including 33 chief advisors. His AKP, once a remarkably well-organized mass party that experimented with a pro-globalization “Muslim-democratic” model in the early 2000s, now openly embraces a brand of far-right Islamism and nationalism. It has, in the last decade, morphed into a vast patronage network and economic interest group devoid of real ideological goals—an 11-million-strong political machine that implements Erdoğan’s will without question. Joining Erdoğan is his far-right nationalist ally, the Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP), led by the enigmatic Devlet Bahçeli, who nowadays appears to exert more influence over policy than the AKP itself. Formerly a staunch critic of Erdoğan, Bahçeli altered the political landscape in 2015 by lending critical support to a government increasingly reliant on the state’s coercive machinery—an actor with the potential to re-maneuver his loyalties that must be factored in when assessing Turkey’s political future. Finally, while trying to form what the opposition calls a “one-man” (tek adam) regime, Erdoğan has also built a major oligarchic coalition. This includes media magnates enriched through political patronage, business associations like MÜSIAD and TOBB, which function as regime enablers, as well as opaque religious orders and cults aligned with the government.
On the other side stands a revitalized social and political opposition. The political wing is led by İmamoğlu and the CHP, Turkey’s oldest political party, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This secular-patriotic and social democratic party, which won the 2024 local elections, remains the main opposition force in a largely hollowed-out parliament. Although it was skeptical of EU accession in the early 2000s—especially over the EU’s handling of the divided island of Cyprus—the CHP today fully embraces EU integration. In terms of values, it is the most pro-European party in Turkey, envisioning an egalitarian democracy and parliamentary system rooted in European-style civil liberties and freedoms. Complementing the CHP’s political leadership is a vibrant social base propelled by civic activism. It coalesces a broad cross-section of society, from university and high school students to pensioners, workers, farmers, religious conservatives, secular nationalists, and liberals—all united in resistance to Erdoğan’s authoritarian campaign.
Meanwhile, the Kurdish movement, arguably one of the most experienced and organically rooted political forces in the country, waits cautiously from the sidelines. Though broadly supportive, it has not prioritized alignment with İmamoğlu’s democracy movement. Instead, it remains preoccupied with a murky peace process that Erdoğan’s government revived with the PKK and its Syrian affiliates—a process widely viewed as a divide-and-conquer strategy rather than a genuine negotiation. While the initiative initially looked promising, with MHP support and the jailed PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan calling for disarmament, it has since stalled. The pro-Kurdish DEM Party, a long-standing and unyielding opponent of Erdoğan—especially since the breakdown of peace talks in 2015—remains a crucial potential ally. Should the Kurdish movement choose to throw its full weight behind the democratic front, it could be a game-changer.
Amid this unprecedented domestic convergence, international reactions have been mixed, if not outright favorable to Erdoğan. He continues to enjoy support from autocrats around the world. With Donald Trump back in the White House and far-right ideologies gaining further ground worldwide, Erdoğan faces minimal external pressure. The United States administration has dismissed recent events as an “internal affair,” echoing Moscow’s rhetoric. Pro-democracy actors such as the executive branches of the European Union have thus far shown neither the vision nor the political will to lead the global defense of democracy. Their cooperation with Erdoğan persists, driven largely by realpolitik concerns such as Syria, Ukraine, immigration, border control, and the future of European security. To date, meaningful support for Turkey’s democratic opposition has come primarily from the European Parliament, civil society organizations, and city governments.
Hence, Turkey’s democracy movement will largely have to succeed on its own, relying on the country’s own democratic traditions, the people’s enduring will for dignity and justice, and the hard-won lessons and strategies opposition actors have developed over decades of democratic backsliding.
Know-how and inspiration are precisely where global democrats need stronger synergy. There is growing agreement among scholars that defeating contemporary autocratization requires different strategies, but there is far less consensus on what they should be. This knowledge must emerge from the ground up, and the Turkish opposition has already made significant strides in producing such methods. Their creativity may well prove to be their most powerful weapon, as I will explore in the next part of this analysis.
Murat Somer is a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Özyeğin University, Istanbul, and a Senior Fellow at the Global Forum for Democracy and Development, based at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest.
